The chairman of the Keith Hospital says he resorted to desperate measures to organise a meeting with the Premier to discuss the hospital's problems.

James De Barro attended an ALP fundraising dinner in an attempt to gain a few minutes with Jay Weatherill.

The financially troubled hospital has been given a one-off $350,000 grant to keep it running after the Government withdrew a similar amount of funding last year.

Mr De Barro says the board found it difficult to engage with the Government after the funding was cut.

He says he attended the ALP fundraiser late last year after several failed attempts to arrange meetings with former premier Mike Rann.

"I was desperate to be perfectly honest to get the opportunity to sit down and have a conversation so I found the opportunity to attend a dinner and it was a dinner where the Premier was to be and the Cabinet for that fact," he said.

"Through that particular evening I did get time to spend a handful of minutes with the new Premier and I've got to say he was particularly interested in the Keith and District Hospital.

"He promised he would organise a meeting because he wanted to learn more and so prior to Christmas we were able to have a meeting, me and a couple of other board members, with the Premier and Minister Hill and the CEO of Country Health SA."

'Suspicion was mutual'

Mr De Barro did not place all of the blame on the Government for the situation.

"Profitable conversations or agreements need to be built on trust and we were short of that and I think there's been a legacy in our organisation of, rightly or wrongly, suspicion to governments," he said.

"I can appreciate how the State Government, whether it be this one or preceding ones, found it maybe somewhat difficult to deal with an organisation like ours because there were some walls between them."

Covering nearly one-third of the continent, in deserts with poor soils, humble Australian spinifex grasses contain nano-sized particles that can amp the performance of a range of everyday items, researcher Nasim Amiralian writes.

Former treasurer Wayne Swan says that real private sector wages have grown by just 1 per cent under the Abbott and Turnbull governments, which he says equates to only one year of growth under the previous Labor government.